Obama Off and Running

Barack Obama smiled when I asked him why white people always call him "unthreatening."

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Does a black man have to be "unthreatening" to get elected president in 2008? I asked.

"Well, look, our racial politics are complicated in this country," Obama said. "There are lots of wounds that are still healing."

I also asked the Democratic senator from Illinois if he were on some kind of crusade, some venture other than getting himself into the Oval Office.

"No, no, no, if I am runnin' for president, it is not symbolic, it's to win," Obama said. "But it's also to transform the country."

I interviewed Obama for a half-hour in his Senate office on Wednesday. Obama talked about race and his intention to unite the country. He also made a few veiled references to his opponents.

He spoke quietly, often with his chin cupped by his left hand, his left arm resting on the arm of his chair. He would sometimes drop his "g's" when making a forceful point and he sometimes paused or hesitated while answering, as if to find just the right word.

Other campaigns are attacking you as being a blank slate, that you have a pleasing persona but don't offer specifics on what you want to do as president, I said. How do you intend to respond to attacks?

"I learned my politics in Chicago, a place not known for producing pushovers," Obama said, straightening up. "If somebody goes at us, we'll respond. I am not averse to drawing sharp contrasts between myself and other candidates."

But Obama does not intend to attack the other candidates. Quite the opposite: He wants to be a healing force. Some people, he said, think he is "naïve" for attempting this.

But for the Democratic primaries, portraying himself as a healer is anything but naive: The chief vulnerability of Hillary Clinton, her critics say, is that she is a "divisive" figure.

Without mentioning any names, Obama said that even with people he does not agree with, "I listen to them and give them the benefit of the doubt. I assume the best of people. And that, I think, is an attitude that is maybe rare in politics these days."

What about the charge that he is a blank slate and not specific on issues?

"We've given major speeches on just about every issue," he said. "So the key for us, I think, is just making sure that we are getting the press to focus attention on that agenda as opposed to, you know, obsessing on how I look in my swimming trunks."

He also said: "I've written two best-selling books that probably give people more insight into how I think and what I care about than, perhaps, any presidential candidate or potential presidential candidate in history."

Does he have a game plan?

"Well, we better have a game plan!" he said. "I am not just wakin' up here and saying: 'What do I do today?' Look, I think that we've got to earn our stripes. I have been on the national scene for a shorter period of time than any of the other candidates, although I have actually been in politics longer than a number of them and have been in elected office longer than several of them."

Obama served eight years in the Illinois Senate and has served two years as a U.S. senator. Hillary Clinton has served just over six years as a senator and is beginning her second term. John Edwards served one term in the U.S. Senate. When you look at it that way, Obama's campaign will emphasize, he does not look that inexperienced.

Why is he running now?

"There is an impatient streak in him," said Bill Daley, who ran Al Gore's campaign in 2000 and is now backing Obama. "Young guy, gets to Washington, looks around, and says, 'I am not going to sit around here for 30 years.' This guy, not in a bad sense, knows he's got the capability and he is going to fulfill his promise. In some people, it's arrogance. In him, it is a need to fulfill what he can do."

Daley also said with a laugh, "By October, people will think Obama has been in the Senate for 300 years; they will have read so much about him and heard so much about him!"

Only three African-Americans have been elected to the Senate since Reconstruction and only two African-Americans have ever been elected governor. In other words, it's pretty tough for black candidates to win statewide office, let alone national office.

But Obama is a fresh force in American politics, his supporters say. He does not come out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as other black candidates have done, though he is careful to pay his respects to them.

Do you believe that the election of you, a black man, to the presidency in 2008 would show something good about America? I asked him.

"The fact that I am in a position to run a credible race is a sign of enormous progress," he said. "The fact that people have taken this campaign seriously and we've got a chance to win is a testimony not only to how far America has traveled but also to the legacy of (Jesse) Jackson's race and (Shirley) Chisholm's race and Carol Moseley-Braun's and (Al) Sharpton's races. Each time the effort is made, certain barriers are broken. And I am a beneficiary."

In his speech last Friday to the Democratic National Committee, Obama said: "Our politics has become small, timid, calculating and cautious." So I asked him if he intended to make boldness a hallmark of his campaign.

"I hope so," he said. "Some of it by necessity. If I am running for president against some very capable, well-organized individuals, who have had years to set up an infrastructure, then we are going to have to do things differently to be successful. I can't just paint by the numbers."

One difference, Obama said, will be "allowing our campaign be a vehicle, to be a participation to a lot of people who have been turned off by the process or haven't been fully engaged."

Obama, as do other candidates, wants to use the Internet to connect people and build support. But he also hinted at the possibility of letting such "net-citizens" play a role in running the campaign.

He said that after his DNC speech, he had gone to George Mason University where "these college kids had organized a rally without any involvement by our staff. We figured there would be a couple of hundred people there, and there were 3,500 people. They had just organized it through Facebook on the Internet."

Obama said letting outsiders run some aspects of his campaign might be worth it. "That kind of grassroots efforts can be scary, in that I think it is hard for any campaign to give up any kind of control and there is a tendency to try to do things top down," he said. "But I think we are in a moment where there is a possibility, not a certainty, but a possibility of bottom-up activism that I think could reshape the political landscape."

Obama also said that his years as a community organizer on the far South Side of Chicago taught him that "if you want to lead, you have to be able to listen."

"If I think that the campaign is all about me, then I am going to lose," he said. "It's too big a job, campaigning in 50 states and doing all the things that have to get done. What I want is a campaign to be a vehicle for people to get involved, use their talents, feel connected to something larger than themselves."

I ended the interview by asking Obama about a quotation from Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize-winning black author, who said she looked forward to a world "where race exists but it doesn't matter."

Is that the kind of world you want to see? I asked him.

"I would love to see an America where race is understood in the same way that the ethnic diversity of the white population is understood," Obama said. "People take pride in being Irish-American and Italian-American. They have a particular culture that infuses the (whole) culture and makes it richer and more interesting. But it's not something that determines people's life chances and there is no sense of superiority or inferiority.

"I think if we can expand that attitude to embrace African-Americans and Latino-Americans and Asian-Americans, then we will be in a position where all our kids can feel comfortable with the worlds they are coming out of, knowing they are part of something larger."